Then, at the beginning of 1861, Kate ceased to reply to Emily’s letters, of which only three have been published and probably few more survived. Kate was not silent from indifference; Mrs. Patterson assembles sound evidence that she too suffered bitterly. But she was apparently convinced that their relation had reached an impasse, and by April 1861 Emily’s pain and veiled reproach so troubled her that she wrote terminating their connection. This month marked the beginning of Emily’s withdrawal from social contacts. She refused particularly to see anyone who might mention Kate’s name, for fear of her own reaction if she heard it spoken. Meanwhile, Kate had turned for comfort to her friend, Gertrude Vanderbilt, wife of a New York judge and some six years her senior, on whom she evidently could depend for complete understanding. Mrs. Vanderbilt seems to have offered sane advice—which may even have preceded Kate’s final letter to Emily—and some religious consolation. When in the fall of 1861 Kate felt constrained to visit Sue Dickinson, knowing that to sever the connection without reason would arouse awkward conjecture, she played safe by bringing Mrs. Vanderbilt with her. To the still uncomprehending Emily, this effective preclusion of private interviews was a bitter final blow. All this, it must be admitted, is a fairly detailed reconstruction of events for which proof positive can never be produced. But it did not deserve the wholesale damnation which critics accorded Mrs. Patterson’s volume when it appeared. Other biographers had noted the meticulous omission of any descriptive detail in Emily’s love poems which could give a clue to the beloved’s identity or personality. The present writer, still little acquainted with Dickinson (to her shame be it said) when _Bolts of Melody_ appeared in 1945, was assured by several lovers of Emily’s poetry, on the internal evidence in that volume, that the poet belonged in this study. Let us grant, then, that Emily may in her early life have felt “idealistically amorous” (as one critic phrases it) toward certain young men, notably Gould and Newton, with whom her associations came to nothing. (Both died quite young, which might partially account for Emily’s concern with death.) She also probably fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth whom she met in Philadelphia in 1854. (This has the vote of Mark Van Doren, specialist in historical research.) But she saw Wadsworth no more than three times again, probably only twice, and then only for a few hours. In her late twenties—a dangerous age for emotional spinsters—she met the first woman whose mind matched her own. She was off guard precisely because her new friend was a woman; but Kate Anthon had virtually a man’s emotional approach. An explosive result was almost inevitable. Mrs. Patterson’s demonstration of how closely a new out-going happiness in poems and letters paralleled Emily’s meeting with Kate Anthon, how exactly the